Category Archives: Nissan Racing

The top finishers from each country showed up for the deciding race in Silverstone: Matthew Simmons from Australia, Ryan Lynch from the United States (we were rooting for him at Blackburn Nissan, as you might expect), Hüseyin Dağli from Turkey, Ali Samy from North Africa, and Juan Carlos Carmona from Mexico, in that order on the grid based on their qualifying performances.

The race was a nail-biting eight-lap sprint. Simmons was off to a great start but too slow in the first corner and dropped to third. Lynch missed a braking point and nearly spun, after which the fight for first was all between Dağli and Simmons, who left everyone else behind as they raced for victory.

When it seemed as though Simmons might finally have cemented first place with back-to-back fastest lap times, a mechanical fault caused his car to lose power and he fell back to third.

Though Dağli won the race, in an unprecedented move, the judges deliberated for an hour before finally announcing Simmons as the GT Academy 2015 champion, signifying the start of his new career as a professional racing driver.

There’s nothing like taking a tuned car ‘round the touge run with tires screaming at every corner. In Motorhead magazine’s latest video feature, Takada and his crew took several racing teams for a special hillclimb event at the Mazda Turnpike of Japan’s Hakone Mountain, and the result was just pure fun for us gearheads.

Our favorite run came from professional D1 GP driver Kawabata Masato, who muscled his Toyo Tires R35 Nissan GT-R drift car in a nail-biting fifth gear, full throttle around the frighteningly-high Hakone bridge!

Veteran Super GT and D1 GP star Nob Taniguchi put on a good show in an attempt to one-up Masato in his tuned HKS GT600 GT-R, but we doubt anything could have trumped that epic drift.

Check out the video below for the full recap of the Motorhead Hill Climb. If that Nissan GT-R looked as mighty to you as it did us, come give it an up-close look at Blackburn Nissan.

Nic Hamman, a Wisconsin native and lifelong racing enthusiast, has won the fourth season of Nissan GT Academy, a program that takes the best virtual Gran Turismo gamers and turns them into real racecar drivers.

Hamman secured his crown in a group of 11 racers on the Silverstone circuit in England, driving a Nissan 370Z on the road course. Far from the world of PlayStation, these racers faced entirely real conditions.

“The whole thing has been an awesome experience for me,” Hamman told Nissan. “I can’t thank everyone at Nissan, Sony PlayStation and Silverstone enough for giving me this opportunity and believing in me.”

It’s programs like Nissan GT Academy that make Nissan such an interactive and forward-thinking company. That attitude is clearly reflected in Nissan’s vehicles, which are always intuitive, innovative, and efficient.

Visit us at Blackburn Nissan to check out one of the many available models we have in store. Congratulations to the Nissan GT Academy Season 4 winner, Nic Hamman!

It’s no secret than Nissan has been focusing most of its research and development efforts on fuel economy, electric vehicles, and autonomous driving technologies, but don’t let that fool you. Nissan’s passion for race cars, motors sports and performance vehicles isn’t taking a backseat, either.

Besides the automaker’s focus on expanding their lineup of mass-market sedans and crossovers, Andy Palmer, Nissan EVP and head of product planning insists that the futuristic IDx and the BladeGlider are a part of Nissan’s midterm plan that extends into 2018.

“Does that guarantee absolutely that we’ll do the cars? It doesn’t,” he says in a recent Forbes article. “But basically, it’s in the plan. The technology exists, we know who the customer is, we’ve essentially laid out the R&D budget that allows it to happen. Now, basically, it’s about making the economics work.”

Race cars like the 370Z sports car and the GT-R are at the forefront of Nismo, but Palmer sees the importance of focusing more broadly, particularly when it comes to future performance models. Nissan’s aim continues to be the creation of performance cars that anyone can afford, and they hope to be at the forefront of changing the way we look at racing.